What
will it take to convince America’s Christian parents to stop sending
their children to the public schools?

Earlier
this month, a girl at Pilgrim High School in Warwick, Rhode Island, had
her artwork censored by “educators.” The student had painted
a mural that was deemed objectionable because it depicted a boy growing
up, marrying, and having a child. In fact, the “educators”
found it so offensive that they ordered it blotted out by painting over
it.

The
girl’s parents called a local radio talk show to complain, and the
fat was in the fire. (Full
story, plus photos)

Had
the parents not called the radio show, and had the school district not
been dragged onto center stage as an example of political correctness
run amok, the censorship order would have stood. Marriage and the family,
at Pilgrim High School, would have remained, for all practical purposes,
obscene.

The
story is not that the censorship was overruled. The story is that public
educators think that marriage and the family are obscene. Really—what
if kids should have to pass by that mural on their way to a Gay-Straight
Alliance meeting? They shouldn’t have to see something like that!

School
officials didn’t actually use the word “obscene.” What
they did say was, “[S]some of the members of the Pilgrim High School
community suggested that the depiction of a young man’s development
may not represent the life experiences of many of the students at Pilgrim
High School,” and that therefore the assistant principle “asked”
the student “to look at other ways to show the outcome of the subject’s
progression to adulthood.” Need we ask what “other ways”
would have been found acceptable?

What
a load of hypocritical, oily, pusillanimous bunk. But actions speak louder
than words; and their actions said, loud and clear, “We find marriage
and family life obscene.”

We object
to having to qualify marriage by calling it “traditional marriage”
as if there were any other kind. There are only marriage and various relationships
that are not marriage, no matter what you call them.

What
do Christian fathers and mothers think they’re getting, by sending
their children to be educated by persons who find marriage so offensive
that they must paint over a picture of a family? Day after day, five days
a week for thirteen years, kindergarten through twelfth grade, the children
of Christians see and hear what their “teachers” think of
Christian life and faith. Can the parents be so deluded as to think this
has no effect? Has it never occurred to them that they themselves, merely
by sending their children to those schools to hear those messages, are
tacitly consenting to those messages?

A Christian
father once told me it didn’t matter what his children were being
taught in public school, “because I just de-program them every day.”
What kind of thinking is that? How will he answer, if the child asks,
“Gee, Dad, if what they’re teaching me in school is wrong,
then why do you make me go there?” But of course very few children
get de-programmed every day; so the kids are bound to take it for granted
that Mom and Pop approve of the school’s teachings.

Everybody
has his own rationalization for why his kids must go to public school.
Homeschooling? “We can’t do it, we both have to work—and
anyhow, we don’t know anything about how to be teachers.”
Christian school? “We can’t afford it! Besides, there isn’t
a good Christian school anywhere around here.” Then there’s
the whole potpourri of excuses. “It’s the only way my daughter
can be in the band. They’ve got a real good chess program for my
son. I once heard about a homeschooled kid who got eaten by an alligator.
And all those problems that you hear about, they’re only in those
other schools, in other towns, in other states. Our own schools don’t
have anything like that going on.”

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We dare
anyone to say, “Hey, it gets the kids out of our hair all day, and
it’s free! We have to pay the school tax whether we use the schools
or not, so we might as well use them. If one of us had to stay home to
teach the kids, or if we had to pay for Christian school tuition, we wouldn’t
have the money for video games and cable TV and vacations.”

Besides
which, not one bit of that anti-Christian, anti-family stuff goes on at
our school!

Lee Duigon,
a contributing editor with the Chalcedon Foundation, is a former newspaper
reporter and editor, small businessman, teacher, and horror novelist.
He has been married to his wife, Patricia, for 34 years. See his new
fantasy/adventure novels, Bell Mountain and The Cellar Beneath the Cellar,
available on www.amazon.com

We object to having
to qualify marriage by calling it “traditional marriage” as
if there were any other kind. There are only marriage and various relationships
that are not marriage, no matter what you call them.